Matt Chatham: Stench from Trash Bag Day lingers

Credit: Christopher Evans

ALL DONE: Pats defensive lineman Brandon Deaderick empties the stuff out of his locker into a trash bag yesterday at Gillette Stadium.

comments

Trash Bag Day. Yes, Hat and T-Shirt Day is the catchy, infinitely more enjoyable event that gets the most attention, but Trash Bag Day is the painful pseudo-holiday NFL players are more familiar with.

Incidentally, for all but one of the 32 NFL teams, Trash Bag Day stinks.

The morning after a team’s season hits the bricks, a giant, black, heavy-duty trash bag lies on the chair in front of the locker that was a player’s home-away-from-home the last five months. These bags aren’t Louis Vuitton or some other high-end transport. These are the usual household carriages of grass clippings, empty beer bottles and dirty diapers.

The symbolism was always striking to me. The NFL life is obviously an exceptionally rewarding one, but the emotional roller coaster usually ends with a very non-glamorous exit. No red carpet. Just a room full of extremely disappointed people murmuring along as they hastily fill plastic Santa sacks with a season’s worth of junk and memories. I still have several of those bags sitting in storage somewhere that from time to time I’ll unearth and filter through in a sort of happy-sad Clark Griswold “Christmas Vacation” attic scene redux.

Each of these bags is a weird little time capsule — equal parts worthless crap and priceless remnants. Things like padding from a MacGyver-style injury improvisation or inspirational personal notes jotted on the backs of an old game plan are Trash Bag Day gold.

The NFL rarely ends as a player would like it to — especially in those places not named New England. The NFL is all about information load and problem solving. The real answers are always found only on the game film. And those critical pieces of information of exactly how and why the breakdowns happened usually never make it to the public conversation.

But that’s what’s weird about Trash Bag Day. It’s all suddenly over. And without another game, there’s no compulsion to go back to work to get the right answers — to go to the film room and practice field to fix problems as teams are so accustomed to doing. You just throw everything in a bag and go.

As a player, it’s often simultaneously comforting and confounding that all the technicalities that make up cause-and-effect in the game of football can get similarly swept into that big, black plastic bag. The vast majority of the time, media story lines comically miss the mark on the schematic specifics and execution issues you battle with as a team. That’s understandable, as there is almost always a critical piece of information in football outsiders will never have without the game plan or play-call sheet.

But in the aftermath of Trash Bag Day, emotional interpretations often seem to rule the day for insiders and outsiders alike. As players schlep down the hallway with their belongings, the film room houses the errors that bring about impromptu moving days. For those most painful season-enders, I don’t recall watching the game film or not. Trash Bag Day is the only time where not knowing for some players seems an OK place to be.

When there are no games to be played, the bag men often walk on by.

Naturally, spring will come, the disappointment will subside and life will go on as it always does in the NFL. Those black plastic time capsules just gather dust, as the cycle repeats itself and the following year another bag joins the fold.

Matt Chatham is a former linebacker and special teams player for the Patriots and New York Jets. He writes his Chatham Report after every game and in every Friday edition of the Herald. Follow him on Twitter @chatham58.